When we fall in love, we hope – both egotistically and altruistically – that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell.
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
The, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
Oliver used to have a theory he called Love, etc.: in other words the world divides into people for whom love is everything and the rest of life is a mere ‘etc.,’ and people who don’t value love enough and find the most exciting part of life is the ’etc.
It is important to understand that in the modern world we prefer the replica to the original because it gives us the greater frisson. I leave that word in French because I think you understand it well that way.
Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.
No sooner do we come into this world, than bits of us start to fall off.
Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first.
Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.
How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?
None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.
Martha was a clever girl, and therefore not a believer.
Sejarah bukanlah apa yang terjadi. Sejarah hanyalah apa yang dituturkan sejarawan kepada kita.
Lovers are like Siamese twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the survivor has a corpse to lug around.
Next to not living with those one loves, the worst torture is living with those one doesn’t love.
Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously?
It is better to waste your old age than to do nothing at all with it.
A facetious if logical question comes into George’s mind, from where he cannot tell, unless as a reaction to all this unwonted intensity. If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.